Nico Hoerner made a home run on Tuesday. It’s not a videotape shot — the ball kept his racket 364 feet at 97 mph, making it 31 feet shorter, nearly 8 mph from the average home run this season, but he certainly got it all. Many players played soft and shorter home runs. This is mainly noteworthy as this is Hoerner’s first home run this season.
Among qualified players, Hoerner ranks 10 at the bottom of the ranks with tough rates, barrel rates and highest and 90 exit speeds. He is a contact batsman, not a batsman, and it works very well. He has runs of 102 WRC+ this season and has improved in each of the past four seasons. Still, he has played at least seven home runs in each of the past three seasons and he will be on the board at some point. Xavier Edwards can’t say the same thing.
In three-part seasons in Miami, the 25-year-old Edwards hit only one home run in 678 sets. He is the only qualified player this season with a barrel rate of 0%, which means he hasn’t hit the barrel in 291 sets and 216 hits. I came up with it all because Hoerner’s home run made Edwards the only player currently with enough cricket to qualify for a batting championship without any home runs. He is the only player to join the increasingly unique fraternity: no local qualifier club.
Since 1901, 588 players have played enough games to qualify for a batting championship without a single home run. It used to be the hottest club in the league, but its members began to disappear when Babe Ruth and his giant bat arrived to teach the world about miraculous new inventions called “Swing.” In the 1980s, membership was sketched out a little again, but in the picture above, the added expansion team made the revival look bigger than it actually is. This is obvious when you look at the number of home run qualifiers on a per team or per level basis.
In the age of the Dead, sometimes one-third of the league’s qualified batsmen didn’t hit home runs, but since then it’s getting harder for clubs to break in. It contains 364 members and 588 qualified seasons, but more than half of the seasons appeared before the end of World War II. In addition, nearly 7% of the players who achieved this difference changed the team in qualifying. In 1901, 7 of the club’s 12 members participated in multiple teams. In other words, they were so bad that their first team gave up on them, and the other team figured out: “Of course, they’ll get stuck in it at some point,” and then proved wrong.
As Russell Carleton pointed out earlier this week Baseball prospectusContact players are becoming increasingly scarce these days, but even in the 1950s, if you weren’t able to do home runs, it was hard to do well enough to be worthy of the day-to-day role. In 1989, up to 5% of qualified players held a non-stop season for the last time. The last team to have more than one such player was the Cardinals in 1986. Vince Coleman stole 107 bases and won his place, while Ozzie Smith fought a 4.9 war with excellent contact hits and hit defenses like something like a guide.
Only 10 players have joined the home run-free qualifier club this century, but even during that time, getting off was steep. Only one player has entered one since 2012, when Ben Revere showed his legendary tenderness to baseball through 588 homeless plate appearances. There is a 10-year gap, during which it is completely reasonable to assume that the club has died completely. Then in 2022, Myles Straw took 596 glorious, powerless plates while running 65 WRC+. He was able to bring up 1.4 wars due to a great defensive season in midfield, and because 65 WRC+ is not necessarily disqualified from the Guardian in 2022. Straw even managed to fool at least one announcer into thinking about a brief moment that he might actually put one on the fence.
Straw is the only active member of the home run qualifier club. I’ve been waiting for the club to write until we get on a qualified player and have the opportunity to reopen it, and Hoerner sacrificed himself for the cause on Tuesday. But now we are here, I’m not positive Edwards is our horse. Yes, he played Miami home run in a tough park. Yes, only 13.3% of the tough balls in his career are flying balls. But this only requires one, and he will definitely have many opportunities. Last season, he hosted the 2.2 War, which is second on the team, even though he only played 70 games. This season, he once again became one of the better players on the team with 0.8 Wars and 98 WRC++. He made only 303 sets last season and he has reached 109 mph this season.
Yes, it goes straight into the dirt at a launch angle of -21 degrees, but that’s much harder than other players at the bottom of the Statcast rankings. It’s a long season and anything can happen. If Edwards even entered the seat a few times, it wouldn’t necessarily be shocked. But while he is the only one in the process of being eligible, the other three competitors have a chance to qualify.
No local potential qualifiers
I would be surprised if Alex Verdugo got there. He kept hitting, and he also allocated time on the left field with Eli White, whose war was not in front of the left field. Additionally, Verdugo has hit double-digit home runs in five of each of the past four seasons. It’s a particularly ugly stretch, but like many players, he’ll just play enough to get him to start hitting a home run.
Santiago Espinal found himself in a similar situation. He is very close to qualifying now, but his shooting percentage is even worse than Verdugo, and he has also started playing for the game time in recent weeks. The Red Army had wildcard ambitions and if there were no contributions, he might start more. Either way, if he can’t beat a title in Cincinnati, it makes him unlikely to win a batting title.
This makes us a real choice. Nick Allen is now in Orlando Arcia, Colorado, and is deeply rooted in Atlanta’s shortstop, and if there’s one thing about brave love, take the term “everyday player” literally. Allen has only 10 sets from the qualifying round, and he has started every game this month. Additionally, although he didn’t hit him at all, he ranked ninth in baseball and according to FRV, according to the PhD. Even if Allen is going to find a more way to struggle – to be honest, what would that look like? – It’s hard to see where the substitute comes from. Currently, the Brave has no minor ready to do anywhere as good as Allen. Unless he is injured, he seems to be a qualified lock.
As for the other side of the equation, Allen returned three times in 2023, once in 2024. But, of the players who have played at least 230 sets, he is currently third in the 90 EV, MAX MAX EV and hard hit percentage. His average exit speed put him fifth from the bottom, and he joined Edwards as the only player without a barrel throughout the season. If someone doesn’t have a home run all season, Allen is our horse.
Still, the smarter bet is that no one will join the club. This has only happened once in the last 12 years, and anything from mild injuries to DFA to garbage time home runs could derail any of our competitors. Home run qualifier clubs have been on the thin line between exclusivity and extinction since the 1980s. There are only two legitimate contenders this season early this season and it may die for another year.
